John Severne slept.
He was gentled somehow. He’d shared his intensity, his fire and his fully hardened flesh. Her touch had softened him in every way. His brow was relaxed. His jaw unclenched. His arms relaxed on the bed. His powerful legs were coiled in the sheets.
But as he slept and the call of his Brimstone blood quieted in her head, Katherine heard another call. This one was louder and hotter than any she’d ever experienced. Her head throbbed with pressure and pain. She crept from the bed as if pulled by a powerful magnet. She bit her lip until it bled against the whimper that tried to erupt from her lips.
She walked step by reluctant step into the next room.
A trance of purpose had claimed her, and she couldn’t resist.
Beneath the glow of flickering gaslight sconces, an old, scarred trunk sat, worn from use and abuse. Made of some unknown wood blackened with age, the trunk seemed as if it had petrified to stone. There was no key. It opened to her touch. But held in its dark cavity was an iron cask that was obviously too hot for her hands. She drew back and squinted against its heat.
The magnet that drew her wouldn’t be denied. There was Brimstone fire in that iron cask, and it wanted her to find it. She went in search of something to help her without thinking about what her prying might mean or what opening the cask might reveal. The call she’d always felt from daemons seared her brain, more demanding than ever before.
In Severne’s spartan bedroom, there were only a few drawers and cabinets to search. She found clothes. Mundane toiletries. And a drawer full of rusty iron brooches that caused her to gasp.
Like the one she’d found in Vic’s room. Like the one she’d seen on the carved angel’s neck before the winged shadow had touched her. The iron brooches were heavy and marked with an ornate L.
There were hundreds in the drawer.
Her heart slowed to a sluggish stall. Her ears rang. Her mouth, still tasting of Severne’s wood smoke, went dry.
Hundreds.
How many souls were trapped forever in l’Opéra Severne’s walls?
She’d thought it a strange purgatory in a place plagued by curses. But now her heart whispered uglier revelations. About Severne. About what he had done.
She reached to pick up one of the brooches. All feeling left her fingers from its chill, like an echo of the winged shadow’s touch. All feeling returned with a scorched sting when she used the brooch to flip back the iron cask’s lid.
A scroll rested inside, and smoke rose as it unfurled beneath her gaze. With a snaky hiss, the paper sizzled as the air hit the words emblazoned upon it.
The name Michael glowed in red.
Above it, she saw other names slashed through with burned black lines...just like the tally marks on Severne’s beautiful arm. The marks she’d kissed to impart imagined healing.
The name most recently marked through was Lavinia. Eric’s mother’s name.
“You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be anywhere near that,” Severne said. “You’ll burn yourself to the bone.”
He came into the room and moved quickly to roll the scroll and shut the iron casket. He placed it back inside the trunk. Practiced moves. Ones he’d completed hundreds of times?
Smoke curled from his fingers, but he didn’t cry out, protected by his Brimstone blood.
She’d felt those callouses intimately. The ones caused by being burned again and again.
“You weren’t there to help. You were there for the same reason as Reynard. You were there to kill Eric’s mother,” Kat said. “You are a daemon hunter.”
“Reynard completed the task set for me. But I wound up with much more to worry about. You. Eric. This,” Severne said. He was naked, with nothing but the sheet wound around his waist. But he no longer looked relaxed. He looked as ready to fight as ever.
“Michael. I’ve asked you about that name. He was the patron dating my sister. He’s the next name on your list. Did they run away to prevent his being a future tally mark on your arm? All those marks, all those iron brooches in your drawer,” Kat said. She backed away from Severne. As she did, her bracelet made an unusual sound unlike its normal chime. She brought her wrist up and saw the silver had blackened as if it had been scorched.
She hadn’t touched the iron cask. The L brooch had been ice in her hand. The only time she’d touched Brimstone’s heat... Her eyes darted to the bed where she’d experienced the full burn of Severne’s orgasm.
The blackened bracelet she’d found in her sister’s room hadn’t meant that Michael was a threat to Victoria. The threat to her sister was in this room because Vic had taken a daemon lover. She must have removed the bracelet as a rejection of the Order of Samuel. Something they’d always longed to do.
Kat reached for her own bracelet’s clasp. It was still warm to her touch. It took longer than it should have because she’d never removed it and because the metal was stuck together, damaged by Severne’s heat. Finally it loosened, and she was able to allow it to drop to the floor. Not just a rejection of Reynard, but of all she’d felt for John Severne.
Another mad daemon hunter who’d only wanted to use her to get to her sister’s lover.
“Why would you murder your own kind?” she asked to buy time. She needed to get to the door. Would Grim let her pass? Could she find her way back to her room and out of the opera house without the hellhound’s help?
“Katherine, I’m not a daemon. I never corrected your assumption because I’m no better than the daemons I hunt or the daemons I’m forced to serve. My grandfather made a deal with devils for financial gain. He sold our Severne souls. The only way anyone with a drop of Severne blood will ever be free is if I deliver Michael to the Council that rules hell since Lucifer was overthrown,” Severne said.
“You’ve filled the walls of l’Opéra Severne for the Council,” Kat said. She saw the wooden faces in her memory. So many doomed by Severne’s hand.
“A purgatory. A prison. A place where immortal daemons who still rebel for their lost king are trapped and kept from fighting the Council,” Severne said.
“They haunt you. You’re buried under the weight of all the daemons you’ve been ordered to kill,” Kat said.
“They are the Fallen. Older than the Council. Old enough to remember leaving Heaven to rule their own realm. Lucifer and his fellows ruled a hell dimension. But other daemons resented being Lesser because they’d never flown in paradise. They intend to reclaim a paradise they never knew. They want to claim the hell dimension fully and then turn their attention to an invasion of Heaven. They hold my contract. Lucifer’s Army is my enemy by the Council’s order. My father doesn’t even remember that he’s damned. I fight for him. I go on day after day. Night after night. For him,” Severne said. “He deserves to die in peace. Michael is the last name on the list. Once he’s banished to the walls, we’ll be free.”
“Free to suffer for what you’ve done,” Kat whispered, horrified. “Eric is innocent. You were going to kill his mother. You didn’t stop Reynard from killing her.”
“I can’t save them. They are part of Lucifer’s Army, and they doom themselves by rebelling against the Council,” Severne said.
“Not Eric. He’s a boy. He’s not an army,” Kat said.
“He’s a daemon. Damned no matter what I do,” Severne said.
“The daemons trapped in the wall can’t fight the Council. They are forever paused. You’ve taken away their hope. And you risk being a part of the daemon faction that would try to invade Heaven. More war. More destruction,” Kat said. “I thought we couldn’t be together because you were a daemon, but now I discover it’s because you’re an obsessed man, a soulless hunter no better than Reynard.”
She had no tears left. They’d all been burned away.
“Do not interfere. Do not get in the way,” Severne warned.
“You were going to use me to get to Michael, weren’t you? You thought I could find my sister and in turn, you could find her lover. You were using me as Reynard has used my family for decades. Know this, John Severne. Your family is damned, but my family is love—my mother, my sister and even me, Heaven help me. We’ve loved and lost. I will do everything in my power to help Victoria. To prevent her pain. Even if it means damning you to hell.”
“Grim,” Severne said.
Kat didn’t know if the hellhound would leap from the shadows to find her throat or if he would keep her from entering the passageway. She braced herself for teeth or threatening growls.
“Take her to her room and keep her there,” Severne ordered.
The giant dog came forward and waited for her to move.
Kat turned away from the man she couldn’t allow herself to love. He didn’t stop her. He let her walk away.
* * *
She needed to warn her sister about Michael’s name on Severne’s list. She needed to find Eric and get him away from l’Opéra Severne. But there was a hellhound at her heels shepherding her through space and time, and she didn’t have so much as a single bone in her pocket.
“I need to see Sybil,” Kat said. She whispered the entreaty over and over again as they walked down the halls. They’d come back into the part of the opera house where the walls had ears. Hundred of them. And lips to whisper and cry.
Was it her imagination or wishful thinking that Sybil’s name was taken up in a sibilant chant across stiff wooden faces, hundreds of them, calling her name softly? Sybil. Sybil. Sybil.
She wasn’t sure if she could trust the daemon that had cared for Severne like a mother for centuries, but she had no one else to turn to. She already owed Sybil a favor, but perhaps she could bargain another for her help. Sybil would know how to handle Grim. She would know where Eric could be found. She might even be able to get a message to Victoria.
Again and again, Kat spoke the daemon’s name.
She wasn’t paying attention to the walls or shadows. She blindly allowed Grim to herd her along like the German shepherd he vaguely resembled. She stopped in surprise when she rounded a corner to almost bump into Eric where he crouched at the side of the hall.
“I found my mom. It took me a long time because they move. That scared me at first. But I’m glad now. It would be bad to be stuck on the same wall forever. I couldn’t memorize the halls. I just had to keep looking,” he said. He finished chewing on a hard roll from his pocket and dusted the crumbs from his fingers.
Grim had stopped, too. He watched them. She didn’t have long, but she couldn’t simply pass Eric by. She gave the hellhound a stern look and quickly turned her attention back to the daemon boy.
“That’s why you fill your pockets with food,” Kat said. “So you don’t have to stop looking to eat.”
“Yeah. I got pretty hungry a few times. Sybil told me to rest. She’d find me and carry me to bed at first, but I learned to hide after that.” He looked up at the carving with tired eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” Kat said.
She came to his side. Grim didn’t protest, but she could tell he tracked her movements vigilantly with his burning coal eyes. Eric’s mother was indeed carved onto the wall. She stood with one hand stretched toward her son as if she would hold his hand. Her curved fingers extended from the wall, and Kat had to look away. Her stomach ached as if she’d been punched.
“It’s not your fault. They’ve told me that. You were trapped like them. But you’re going to get away. We all are,” Eric said.
He reached up to touch Kat’s face as she leaned down, and he hugged her more fiercely than he had before. Grim stepped closer. Katherine tried to ignore the giant dog. In this moment, her safety didn’t matter, and neither did Severne’s agenda. Only Eric and his mother mattered, and the fact that she hadn’t been able to save him yet.
“I’ll save him. I’ll get him out of here,” she told the carved representation of his mother’s soul. Lavinia didn’t move, but Kat reached out and touched her wooden hand. The wooden fingers weren’t as cold as the shadow’s touch, but they did feel like ice. She began to lose feeling in her hand, but she didn’t pull it away. She endured the pain and tried to look into the daemon woman’s wooden eyes. They were blank. There were no pupils or irises. Only an empty stare. But she met them and tried to reach the soul they contained. “I won’t give up. I won’t run away.”
The cold crept from her hand halfway up her arm.
Grim growled deep and low in his barrel chest as if concerned that the cold might penetrate to her heart.
“I’ve been hiding for a long time, but I know it’s time to take a stand,” Kat promised.
The cold seeped through skin and muscle and bone. She began to shiver. Her teeth clicked together. And still she tried to communicate to whatever was left of Lavinia in the cherrywood. Had the fingers tightened on hers, or was that only ice and imagination?
She was no longer sure she could pull her hand away.
Eric tugged at her other hand as if to get her attention.
Grim was now at her side. He pressed against her legs, urging her to release the daemon’s wooden hand. His heat startled her to action, and she pulled. It took more effort than she expected to break her hand free. The fingers of the wooden hand curled back on the palm as her fingers came away. The eerie reflexive action made her gasp and stumble away from the wall.
She cradled her cold hand against her chest, but the woman in the carving didn’t leap from the wall to extract revenge. Whatever energy she had expended to hold Katherine’s hand was gone...or saved for another time.
Eric saw her heavy breathing in response to being trapped by his mother’s wooden hand.
“It’s okay. She doesn’t want to hurt you. She wants to help you just like you helped me,” he said.
Unlike the ice of the shadow’s touch, the cold from Lavinia’s hand had already begun to fade away. As the cold faded, so did her fear.
“I haven’t helped you yet, but I’m going to. I promise,” Kat said. She reached to place her stiff fingers into the ruff of Grim’s coat. He jumped as if startled by the cold, but he didn’t growl or step away. He let her warm her fingers. It wasn’t exactly like petting a dog. It was more like petting a dragon with fur. But she appreciated the movement it restored to her fingers.
Eric still held her other hand. He was warm, as well. Gradually she felt normal again, but she still cautiously stepped farther away from the wall.
“I’m going to save you both. I know what to do. Mom told me,” Eric said.
“I’ve heard whispering from the walls, but I haven’t been able to make out what they say,” Kat told him. “I’m not sure they’re actually communicating.”
“They are. They’re alive. Only trapped. It’s up to me to set them free,” Eric said.
Kat wasn’t expecting the boy at her side to turn and run away. She called to him, but she couldn’t follow. Grim had stepped between her and the boy’s retreating figure. The hellhound’s large body pressed against her legs, holding her in place. She was caught. Trapped by Severne’s orders to his enormous and loyal beast.
“I thought we’d become friends,” she complained to the hellhound.
He looked up at her with an inscrutable quirk of his head as if to say he had no friends. Only unbreakable ties to John Severne.
She had no choice. She could only hope the daemons trapped in the walls could communicate and that they would pass her message on to Sybil. Her mother had stood against Reynard and the Council with no help by her side. Kat needed to learn from her mother’s mistake. She didn’t intend for her stand to have the same outcome as her mother’s.
When she made it to her room, Grim watched with his head down and his forelegs braced until she slipped inside.
To wait.